Uhhh, you choose to listen to those most knowledgeable, that's good and fine. But to say you will listen to "Climate Scientists" only, well that for one ignores any questioning of data and debate (not real science) and as I said, "Climate Scientists" include meteorologists and others that you want to ignore... you simply can't have it both ways. Climate Scientists consist of scientists from many fields

GMTom wrote:and in Antarctica we saw record levels of ice ...just sayin

Understanding the complexity of the earth's climate is something that we haven't mastered.

I tend to avoid this issue, much for the same reason that freeman2 stated. I'm not a climate scientist, and I see validity on both sides

The likelihood is that there are plenty of other inhabitable planets--and heck, we can even learn to terraform.

Ray Jay wrote:It's funny how we live in an age where calling someone a financial expert is an ad hominum attack.

rickyp wrote:The best solutions are probably going to solve more than just the carbon problem. They'll have to also make economic sense. Increased use of Natural Gas use is one short term solution, provided frakking doesn't destroy the aquifers...

Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick is as green-power mad as any up-and-coming Democrat, and he has set an ambitious goal for the commonwealth’s utilities: begin producing 2,000 megawatts of power from environmentally preferred sources by 2020. Patrick’s green dreams are way up in the air; on the ground, things look starkly different.

Last September in the tiny town of Princeton, Mass., the general manager of the local utility authority sent out an extraordinary little memo that is one part standard bureaucratic posterior-covering and one part cry for help, noting that a modest wind-energy project already has lost nearly $2 million — a whopping number for a community of only 3,413. For perspective, consider that those losses occurred despite all of the subsidies the utility received for its wind-energy work; when the cost of those credits is accounted for, the real losses are even higher, but of course subsidy expenses are not borne in full directly by Princeton residents. Nevertheless, customers of the Princeton Municipal Light Department now pay more than a third more for their electricity than does the average Massachusetts residential customer, adding some $774,000 to their power bills in 2011. The financial position of the PMLD has been weakened, and there is little hope for significant improvements under current conditions.

“As best I can look into the future,” general manager Brian Allen wrote, “I would expect the wind turbine losses to continue at the rate of around $600,000 a year. This assumes current wholesale electricity rates, no need for extraordinary repairs, and that both turbines continue operating. If any major repairs are required, this will be an additional expense for the PMLD. The original warranties on the turbines have expired, and extended warranty options are not available.”

Those warranties are an acute concern: After becoming operational in 2010, one of Princeton’s two wind turbines broke down in August 2011 and was not back online until nearly a year later. Princeton had a warranty from the turbine’s manufacturer, the German firm Fuhrländer, but the usual political cluster of agents and subcontractors meant that the whole mess still is in litigation. If Princeton does not prevail in its lawsuit, it will suffer hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional expenses. The cost of replacing a gearbox on one of the Fuhrländer turbines is estimated at $600,000.

Those breakdowns are real concerns. According to the trade publication, Wind Energy Update, the typical wind turbine is out of commission more than 20 percent of the time — and regularly scheduled maintenance accounts for only 0.5 percent of that downtime. The group also estimates that some $40 billion worth of wind turbines will go out of warranty by the end of 2012, leaving the Princetons of the world looking at a heap of expensive repair bills. In Europe, the largest wind-energy market, operations-and-maintenance expenses already are running into billions of dollars a year.

So where does that leave our friends in Massachusetts?

Mr. Allen did not return messages seeking comment, but he has offered his ratepayers a possible solution: Get the hell out of the wind-energy business. Or, to be more precise, stay in the wind-energy business, but get somebody else to pay for it: “One possibility is to maintain the wind turbines in Princeton but to offload all or a portion of the electricity output, the associated costs and of course future risk and benefits. I personally like this option. Princeton will continue to be a leader in green energy production without having to burden its residents.” And that’s the green-energy ethic in miniature: It’s a wonderful thing, so long as somebody else is paying for it.

Not far away, the town of Portsmouth, R.I., went through a similar drama: After issuing some $3 million in bonds to build a wind turbine, Portsmouth saw the new unit quickly go dark because of mechanical problems. Reports the Westerly Sun: “The wind turbine, erected at Portsmouth High School in 2009, has been idle since June because of a faulty gear box. The town is evaluating whether to replace the gear box, with costs ranging from $611,000 to $703,000.” Local critics have taken to calling the turbine the “$2 million mistake,” although it is in fact a mistake worth at least $3 million plus interest on the bonds.

An underlying cause is over population. If we could reduce population to just under replacement levels .... we'd relieve some stress on the planets resources... And there we have mostly religion working against the use of contraceptives...

People are always the problem.

We'll see what kind of hysteria Matt Damon can stir up with his anti-frakking movie, partly funded by a Middle East power with a vested interest

rickyp wrote:fate

People are always the problem.

Ecologically yes.

The specter of too many people and not enough food has haunted scientists and philosophers since at least the time of Aristotle. The most famous is Thomas Malthus, who in 1798 grimly predicted that population growth would outpace food production, resulting in human death and misery. The Industrial Revolution and new agricultural techniques during the 19th century, however, helped prevent a major global starvation.

Over 150 years later, Paul R. Ehrlich published a bestselling book called "The Population Bomb," in which he projected the starvation of hundreds of millions during the 1970s-80s. While the world saw some devastating famines during those decades—in Bangladesh and Ethiopia, for example—they were not on the global scale that Ehrlich had predicted.

rickyp wrote:You know the term anthropogenic? Its mankind that are changing the current climate, through the release of excess CO2 and other gases.

When women are offered education, and access to contraceptives, they generally have smaller families. Smaller family units have many benefits.

But principally fewer children receive more parenting and resources spent on them and are more often able to grow out of poverty.

I don't know how you can describe women choosing to use contraception can be described as totalitarian.

Doctor Fate wrote:Only one way to stop it: introduce mandatory limits and forced abortion.

rickyp wrote:They are making a choice. Its usually a government, heavily influenced by conservative religions, that ban contraception. Now, that's totalitarian.

In a world where battery efficiency has doubled every two years . . .

. . . the ability to produce more effective and efficient windmills (for instance) shouldn't be discounted...

If people gave up on the development of new energy sources after one or two set backs or slow starts the Alberta Oil Sands would never have occurred. (for instance).

fate

We'll see what kind of hysteria Matt Damon can stir up with his anti-frakking movie, partly funded by a Middle East power with a vested interest

What if he's right?

I'm all for safe use of Frakking. I just wonder if we really can trust it as completely as the oil and gas industry would have us believe. They are nortorious for discounting risk, and short cutting on safety and safe practice.

So, technology cannot solve the problem?

Says you, but that's just opinion. Others would argue larger families have many benefits. You are not an authority on the matter.

How about some evidence before we panic? Even most environmentalists think this is speculative.

That is in no way comparable to windmills and you know it. One is a source of energy; the other is supposed to produce it directly.

rickyp wrote:fate

So, technology cannot solve the problem?

Advances in agriculture dealt with a lot of population growth. But as a consequence there is a great deal more stress on water resources, and more pollution. For example, CO2 production increased greatly.
There is a limit....

fate

Says you, but that's just opinion. Others would argue larger families have many benefits. You are not an authority on the matter.

What we know is that as the average size of families decrease in a nation, the average life span increase. We also know that as family size decreases, the economies of countries improve.

A generation ago Spain was just coming out of its Francoist era, a strongly Catholic country with among the highest birth rates in Europe, with the average woman producing almost four children in 1960 and nearly three as late as 1975-1976. There was, he notes, “no divorce, no contraception allowed.” By the 1980s many things changed much for the better better, as young Spaniards became educated, economic opportunities opened for women expanded and political liberty became entrenched.

Yet modernization exacted its social cost. The institution of the family, once dominant in Spain, lost its primacy. “Priorities for most young and middle-aged women (and men) are career, building wealth, buying a house, having fun, travelling, not incurring in the burden of many children,” observes Macarron. Many, like their northern European counterparts, dismissed marriage altogether; although the population is higher than it was in 1975, the number of marriages has declined from 270,000 to 170,000 annually.

Now Spain, like much of the EU, faces the demographic consequences. The results have been transformative. In a half century Spain’s fertility rate has fallen more than 50% to 1.4 children per female, one of the lowest not only in Europe, but also the world and well below the 2.1 rate necessary simply to replace the current population. More recently the rate has dropped further at least 5 percent.

Essentially, Spain and other Mediterranean countries bought into northern Europe’s liberal values, and low birthrates, but did so without the economic wherewithal to pay for it. You can afford a Nordic welfare state, albeit increasingly precariously, if your companies and labor force are highly skilled or productive. But Spain, Italy, Greece and Portugal lack that kind of productive industry; much of the growth stemmed from real estate and tourism. Infrastructure development was underwritten by the EU, and the country has become increasingly dependent on foreign investors.

Unlike Sweden or Germany, Spain cannot count now on immigrants to stem their demographic decline and generate new economic energy. Although 450,000 people, largely from Muslim countries, still arrive annually, over 580,000 Spaniards are heading elsewhere — many of them to northern Europe and some to traditional places of immigration such as Latin America. Germany, which needs 200,000 immigrants a year to keep its factories humming, has emerged as a preferred destination.

Declining Population

As a result Spain could prove among the first of the major EU countries to see an actual drop in population. The National Institute for Statistics (INE) predicts the country will lose one million residents in the coming decade, a trend that will worsen as the baby boom generation begins to die off. The population of 47 million will drop an additional two million by 2021. By 2060, according to Macarron, Spain will be home to barely 35 million people.

This decline in population and mounting out-migration of young people means Spain will experience ever-higher proportions of retired people relative to those working. This “dependency rate”, according to INE, will grow by 57 % by 2021; there will be six people either retired or in school for every person working.

Do you trust gas and oil companies completely or do you think they should be regulated and have to provide transparency in their activities when using a public resource. (Water specifically)

Wind is a resource.

The first methods of retrieving and refining oil from the oil sands were too expensive, and inefficient. Over time, 40 years, the technologies that make extraction of oil reasonably efficient. made the industry.

Oil has the advantage over electricity of being a portable source of energy, whereas electricity must be transmitted.

The current electricity grids are not designed to take advantage of multiple (thousands or even tens of thousands0 of sources of power... Everything is centralized through transmission. I believe that this transmission problem, and control problem are what currently make wind power too costly.

Those warranties are an acute concern: After becoming operational in 2010, one of Princeton’s two wind turbines broke down in August 2011 and was not back online until nearly a year later. Princeton had a warranty from the turbine’s manufacturer, the German firm Fuhrländer, but the usual political cluster of agents and subcontractors meant that the whole mess still is in litigation. If Princeton does not prevail in its lawsuit, it will suffer hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional expenses. The cost of replacing a gearbox on one of the Fuhrländer turbines is estimated at $600,000.

Those breakdowns are real concerns. According to the trade publication, Wind Energy Update, the typical wind turbine is out of commission more than 20 percent of the time — and regularly scheduled maintenance accounts for only 0.5 percent of that downtime. The group also estimates that some $40 billion worth of wind turbines will go out of warranty by the end of 2012, leaving the Princetons of the world looking at a heap of expensive repair bills. In Europe, the largest wind-energy market, operations-and-maintenance expenses already are running into billions of dollars a year.

Nationally, the Energy Information Administration's (EIA) 2012 National Energy Outlook predicts that the percentage of renewable energy generation in the United States is going to increase due to reduced costs of renewable technologies. At the same time, the EIA predicts that the percentage of U.S. electricity from coal-fired generation will decrease due to a 1.4 percent increase in minemouth costs as coal companies have to move into reserves that are more costly to mine.
Also according to the EIA, the total cost of wind energy without federal tax and other financial incentives is about 9.7 cents/kilowatt-hour. The total cost of conventional coal without federal tax and other financial incentives is about 9.4 cents/kilowatt-hour.

Why are Wind Costs are Decreasing?
There are integration costs associated with intermittent renewable energy but unlike fossil fuels, wind (and solar and many other renewables) the fuel price stays the same: Zero. Plus, wind-power technology has rapidly evolved. Turbines are much larger, growing from an average of 1.2 megawatts to 1.6 megawatts (a 33% increase in average capacity) in just three years. Today's typical new turbine has a 2.3-megawatt capacity; 7-megawatt turbines will be available soon. The newer turbines can wring more electric power out of the wind (especially at lower wind speeds) than older turbines could. The combination of greater output and greater capacity nearly offsets the materials and labor cost increases plaguing traditional resources

The power grids in the former communist countries are “stretched to their limits” and face potential blackouts when output surges from wind turbines in northern Germany or on the Baltic Sea, according to Czech grid operator CEPS. The Czechs plan to install security switches near borders by year-end to disconnect from Europe’s biggest economy to avoid critical overload.

Wind Farms

The bottleneck is one of many in the last eight years as $460 billion of wind farms were built worldwide on plains, hills and at sea before networks were fully expanded to deliver the power to consumers. Upgrading Germany’s system alone to address capacity and technical shortfalls will cost at least 32 billion euros ($42 billion), its four grid operators said in May.

Germany installed more than 8,885 megawatts of wind energy since 2007, mostly in the north. Now it’s studying how to build the power backbone to connect to the industrialized south, home to hundreds of factories such as those of chemicals manufacturer Wacker Chemie AG (WCH) and Siemens AG. (SIE) The electricity detours through the Czech Republic and Poland when German cables can’t handle the load as the countries’ grids are interconnected.

Lack of grid connections, such as in China, or oversupply as in Texas have made wind energy’s global rollout a lumpy process. Wind farms in West Texas earlier this year were paying utilities to use their electricity on particularly gusty days because they can still earn $22 a megawatt-hour in federal tax credits.